MyLittleBall

"Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple. " -- Charles Babbage

MyLittleBall (the most unfortunately titled form of entertainment since the console on which it is played) is the game that puts you, the player, in the position of a bouncy little red ball with an undying urge to further elevate himself by means of randomly arranged platforms.

Challenge a friend and then try to defend your high-score by blasting him off the screen!

Contents

Screenshots

These screenshots are representative of gameplay. Some stuff has changed since:

The intro screen

A screenshot of v1.0.0 gameplay

Gameplay

Standard Mode

Be the ball. Holding it 'normally', rotate the WiiMote left and right to control Mr Ball up and up and up! Keep bouncing on the platforms to avoid falling (falling is a bad idea). See how many points you can get, then challenge your friends, family, secret lovers, teachers and co-workers!

Don't forget to bring a towel.....

NEW! Two-Player mode

Same rules apply, except a second player can pick up a WiiMote, press 'B' in mid-game, and start dropping bombs on the player controlling the ball! Just point and press 'B' to drop.

Controls

Player

Button

Action

Start game

Pause game

Return from whence you came

Move

Join the game/Drop bombs!

Point at where to drop the bomb

Rotate the Wiimote left and right to control the ball. The larger your horizontal velocity, the greater the factor by which your vertical velocity increases (but you don't really need to worry about that).

Player 2 can join any game by pressing 'B' on a second WiiMote. Then, point at the screen and drop bombs to blast your opponent off the screen.

Changelog

v1.0.1

Date Released: 06/03/09

2 player mode! Features:

Starts automatically when 'B' is pressed in gameplay

Point at screen and drop bombs on Ball!

Removed some debugging information

Made 'cheating' nearly impossible

Basic framework for internationalisation, but alternative languages not yet supported.

Added some translations to XML description

Sound effects finally implemented

'Falling platforms' animation added

Used a GRRLIB fix to strange images appearing on start-up

Optimization on storing high scores

v1.0.0

Date Released: 08/02/09

Graphical overhaul, courtesy of SpriteAttack

Added tamper-proof highscoring

Bugfixes

General gameplay improvements

Added music track

Made 'cheating' slightly harder

v0.0.1

Date Released: 21/01/09

Initial Release

Communication Problems (A word on Languages)

No translations this time. Sorry. I've been trying hard, I really have, and the translations you've submitted are very much appreciated. Unfortunately, I wasn't even able to add translations to the meta.xml file because the Homebrew Channel wouldn't allow accented characters. But your translations have not been in vein. I have added them as brief translations of this wiki page, and I hope to add them to the game in the future....but probably not too soon. Sorry.

High Scorings

So you thought you could cheat, huh? FTPed the high score file and modified it, did you? Well, unless you have more determination than a sense of when something is just really not worth pursuing, you will have failed, because accompanying the high score is an (albeit very simple and probably very breakable) hash. I don't doubt that the clever people in this community could have it broken without breaking a sweat, but all the same, I'd like to keep the highscore system as secure as possible, so that should I later decide to implement an online highscore store, I won't have to wipe everyone's existing highscores.

Oh - and anyone who hacks the system is obliged to create a new one.

Sounds like fun

Hurray! Sound effects are working and so is the background music. And the best part is when it was broken it wasn't my fault! The latest build of libogc has fixed a bug in the old version. Three cheers for sound effects!

Plot

This one's up to you. Submit a plot/storyline for the game on the Discussion page. The best (and most amusing) story will win.

Secret Sauce

At this point, for various boring reasons I can't be bothered to go into, I will not be officially releasing the source code. If you're really that keen to see some poorly written and messy C code, try typing in random requests to pastie.org. Who knows - you might get lucky!

Thanks for all the fish

Big thanks to SpriteAttack for bringing some much needed character to the game